Abe - who had been a senior paralegal during his 20-year service - approached everything with a simple philosophy: Prove it.
Each had something to say about my upcoming service, each offering a different pot of paint to camouflage me into the background of my fellow soldiers. They lived together, along with Mike’s partner, Larry Hall, in a condominium just off the Wilson stop on the Red Line. Their lessons advocated a combination of caution and performance.
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Mike and Abe were to mentor me on how to survive as a gay serviceman. It was still four months before the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a double-edged policy prohibiting asking any service member about his or her sexuality while enforcing a ban on openly gay service members. It was with his guidance that I enlisted as an intelligence analyst in the United States Army and with his encouragement that I came out, first to him and then to the rest of my family and friends.īefore the end of May 2011, just before I left for basic combat training, my uncle sent me to Chicago to meet his two best friends and fellow sailors, Mike Landry and Abraham Elizondo. In early 2011, I was 19 and visiting my uncle, Senior Chief Petty Officer Brandon Parry, and his family on a naval base in Naples, Italy. The moment I decided to become a soldier and the moment I chose to live openly as a gay man occurred so closely in time that it’s hard to remember which came first. But by then it was hard to ignore the anxiety I felt during required social activities - “mandatory fun,” as it’s called in the military - or the tension from my fellow soldiers.
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I told myself that I should have built a thicker skin at this point that in comparison to the life-or-death hardships of military life, these moments meant nothing. This wasn’t the first time at the Second Battalion, 87th Infantry that I was targeted because of my sexuality, and a part of me marveled that it could still make my hands shake and stomach clench. We never learned whether any action was ever taken against him.
Together we approached our unit’s leadership, where she insisted that the comments had stemmed from the representative’s own homophobic feelings and recommended that he be reprimanded and removed from his position as the unit’s sexual harassment watchdog. I was fortunate that Kalliavas, the officer in charge of the intelligence department where I worked, was a woman with no tolerance for prejudice. In response, and apparently to demonstrate his competency in his assigned position, the noncommissioned officer had taken it upon himself to approach the person he considered inclined toward committing a similar offense in the future: me, the only openly gay soldier in my unit. The evening before, there had been a report of a male-on-male sexual assault in our unit. Meghan Kalliavas would stop by and explain: The noncommissioned officer was the head of the unit’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program. I sat, staring at my computer screen, trying to recall what task I had been working on. His words, and any comfort I might have taken from them, fell flat. Only seconds earlier, we both stood silent, hands clasped behind our backs respectfully, as a noncommissioned officer stood inches from my face and threatened to end my career.Īs we left the office, the sergeant searched for something consolatory to say. I’m certain the expression on my face mirrored the pale, shaken one I saw on his. The sergeant and I stared at each other for a moment as the office door shut.